In today’s N.Y. Times, Jon Schwartz reports that “[a]n obscure contract dispute from the 1990's
that describes questionable building practices and unstable soil at a crucial
New Orleans levee may help explain why the walls that were supposed to protect
the city from hurricanes collapsed under the assault of Hurricane Katrina.” To read the article go here (free
subscription required).

The article reports:

The Army Corps of Engineers hired Pittman Construction for $2.6 million in
1994 to build a reinforced concrete cap with flood-wall segments called
monoliths atop the existing earthen levee. But the government found that the
company's work was not acceptable in several areas and that the monoliths had
shifted.

The company responded that the problem was not the quality of its work but
the "lack of structural integrity" of the steel sheets that are
rammed through the center line of the levee, and "the relative weakness of
the soils," which made it extremely difficult to build a stable structure.
The company asked for $810,000 to correct the problem.

That request was denied in 1998 by Reba Page, an administrative law judge
for the corps, who determined that Pittman Construction had brought on many of
its own problems by not coming up with a successful way to brace the wooden
forms that concrete is poured into. A contractor working on a nearby canal
project, the judge noted, was able to deal with similar soil issues
"without the need for extraordinary construction means, delay or
expense."

Of course, without more information, we cannot assume a connection between the construction problems arising from the
1998 contract dispute and the recent levee failures. Hassan Mashriqui, a professor from the Hurricane Center at Louisiana State University, reminded that the documents don't "tell you what happened after the motion was denied.” The article is certain to state that, based solely on
the legal documents, it is not clear “whether the wall was ultimately repaired
to the satisfaction of the corps, and whether the flawed sections of the levee
were the same ones that failed in the storm.”

Robort Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of
California, Berkeley, saw both sides of the story. Professor Bea said "[w]here
there's smoke, there's fire - usually," but he
added: "Documents don't always tell the whole truth. You have to keep
on probing."